A husband and wife duo - who sell hand-made furniture and pottery in Vermont - share the philosophy that carefully crafted pieces give objects that special something, writes Rose Doyle
CHARLES Shackleton and Miranda Thomas make a great team. Peas in a pod, as the saying goes, with their particular pod being a 200-year-old mill in an idyllic Vermont village where Charles makes hand-crafted furniture and Miranda creates pottery. Their work is hugely appreciated across the US and they themselves much appreciated in Bridgewater, Vermont, by both their workforce and the community at large.
Their joint enthusiasm for what they do permeates the converted mill, which is now a complex of artists' studios with four of its industrious floors occupied by Charles Shackleton Furniture and Miranda Thomas Pottery. The furniture designs - contemporary interpretations of classic, traditional styles - are by Charles. The wood used is mostly walnut and cherrywood from 80 to 100-year-old trees sourced in a sustainable forest in a corner of north-west Pennsylvania. They use a wonderful, velvet-like Lacewood too, from an Australian red oak.
Miranda, polishing her craft to an art, lovingly creates pieces such as the large, porcelain peace bowl presented recently to the UN's Kofi Annan on his retirement. Decorated with a dove carrying an olive branch, 35 similar, smaller bowls were sold at the event, in the UN Headquarters in New York, to help fund UN educational programmes.
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's also been given a Miranda Thomas peace bowl and so has Pope John Paul II (by then president Bill Clinton). There's another in the new Clinton Library in Little Rock.
"Ours are two different businesses side-by-side," Miranda says, "but really they're one. We complement one another."
Hand work, both believe, creates a product which has life and the mill - which is full of the heady scents of wood and oil, where snowy sunlight hits silkily finished woods and where wise and wily animal decorations on pottery pieces - bears testament.
They've known each other a veritable lifetime, since art school in 1970s Surrey, although love didn't find a way until they met again in Vermont in the 1980s.
Charles came from Ireland to nearby Quechee in 1981 as a glass blower with fellow Irishman Simon Pearce who then had a fledgling glass-making venture.
Miranda, by a more circuitous route, arrived at the same destination two years later. They married in 1986 and, in one way and another, have been working together ever since.
Their children, Sofia (19) and Hugh (16), have more than their share of creativity too. The home they all live in, on a hill, with its low beams, family pictures and furniture also includes the benign presence of Lucy, a beloved mongrel brought from Ireland 14 years ago. This is something of a home-from-home in Vermont's pleasant countryside.
It's a long way, and even longer time, from the other mill in Charles Shackleton's life - one dating from 1776 - in Lucan, Co Dublin, where generations of his family made flour. The milling has long ended but an aunt lives there still and photographs on a Vermont wall show its ivy-clad grandeur. Ernest Shackleton, who led an expedition to the South Pole in 1914, was a cousin.
Charles grew up in Beechpark, on the family estate in Clonsilla, and says that he was a child "who loved to make wooden things in my father's garden woodshop".
Miranda, who grew up in Australia, says that Charles, when they first met, "was a shy Castleknock lad, a glass-maker who was always in the wood shop at art school. I was a party girl and romance," she grins, "didn't blossom for six months after we met again in Quechee." They honeymooned, memorably both agree, on the Dingle Peninsula.
By 1987 Charles was working on his own, making and selling furniture, most of it to Simon Pearce who displayed and sold it from his showrooms. Success brought expansion and in 1991 he moved to Bridgewater and began developing workshops in the mill building.
Miranda (who'd been working in a home/basement studio while the children grew up) moved there in 1996. They built their house on its hill seven years ago.
Shackleton Furniture has 12 craftworkers on its workforce and Miranda Thomas has five potters working with her. They're a good natured, passionate-about-their-craft group of people, and fun. A T-shirt on a broad back jokes about the rigours of work in Bridgewater: "I served on the REAL Shackleton expedition!"
Charles, who went to Antarctica himself four years ago, says with much feeling that he "wouldn't wish the South Pole on anybody". Along with individual skills everyone, Charles says, "brings a special devotion to woodworking and the love of making furniture by hand. Each piece is stamped with the date, our own and the maker's name."
Philosophy, if not all, is a great part of the Shackleton/Thomas ouvre. "We're into the real, hand-making thing," says Miranda. "The thing which gives life to an inanimate object and infuses character. It's something we feel is being lost."
They're into Ireland too. "We love going to Ireland, try to get over as often as we can," Miranda says.
"The truth is we get homesick," says Charles. "Though we know that, if we have to be anywhere else, then Vermont's the best place in the world for us to work. Our dream is to have a small house in the west of Ireland."
Charles Shackleton Furniture and Miranda Thomas Pottery showrooms and workshops are at The Mill, Bridgewater, Vermont 05034. They have a shop in Woodstock, Vermont.
www.shackletonthomas.com.
